Those were rose petals floating in the pool at Rob Ford’s ancestral home.

In the gloaming on Friday night, I had mistaken them for dead leaves. A reader who’d attended the Ford Fest backyard BBQ set me straight.

A decorative grace note, perhaps arranged by our gracious hostess, the mayor’s widowed mother Diane, who apparently does not mind when her sons invite over a few thousand guests for their annual open house event, some of them targeted by robocall summoning. Miss Manners wouldn’t approve.

Only a few council colleagues made the trek to the wilds of Etobicoke and none, as far as I could determine, from the lefty end of the political spectrum. A city hall friend noted that downtown pols mostly don’t drive — not part of the mayor’s core car-loving constituency, for all his passionate championing of new subways — and thus would be disinclined to undertake the journey. Since none are averse to expensing cab fare, it’s more likely they simply recoiled from partaking of Ford hospitality. The ideological divide on council is that toxic.

For me, a downtowner to the marrow, the experience was disorienting. I was so jaw-dropping awed by the lush surroundings that I almost walked right into that aforementioned pool. This was the bucolic suburbia where Rob and Doug were raised, an estate financed by their entrepreneurial successful father. The plastic labels company Doug Sr. founded is still a thriving business that remains in the family’s hands.

But the property is not suburbia as most of us understand it, residential enclaves of single-dwelling houses and tidy lawns. A kind of sprawling Xanadu, rather, both baroque — the statuary, the fountains, the terraced lawns — and rustic, surrounded by majestic trees and tangled underbrush, the visitor drawn ever further unto warrens of greenery juxtaposed with kitsch.

It must have been grand, growing up in this quasi-Neverland on the periphery of the city. But it’s not Toronto. It’s not even Etobicoke, preamalgamation, except by geographical designation. And the somewhat slapdash splendour undermines Ford’s bona fides as a suburban Everyman, the antiprivilege boilerplate he rode to electoral victory in the mayoral campaign.

He’s not one of you. He’s a rich man’s scion who’s never ventured far from the orbit of entitlement afforded by a patriarch who segued from private industry to provincial politics, still living close by the old homestead and never really having left it metaphysically. Indeed, an argument can be made that Ford is the most privileged mayor in recent history. That makes his public image a fraud.

The truthful part of the Ford persona is his dimwittedness, dressed up as populism. That galumphing quality found traction with a public wearied by the left wing elitism of David Miller and like-minded councillors, only some of whom survived a voter putsch. This rump, in cahoots with a wishy-washy middle, has effectively curtailed Ford’s agenda as mayor so that his absolute triumphs have been scarce, most notably (grant him this much) renegotiated public union contracts. That didn’t require a whole lot of political skill; merely will.

Yet as blundering naif, for someone who’s been on council for so long, Ford still enjoys considerable public support, I’d venture, possibly more out of pity than admiration. His spinners and media acolytes have done a good job of framing Ford as the iconoclast besieged by politically motivated enemies who will stop at nothing to vilify his administration. Friday’s lawn party may not have been a credible gauge — the Brothers Ford papered the house with fellow-travellers — but, much scathing media commentary (well-deserved) notwithstanding, the mayor appears to have absorbed even last week’s mortifying performance on the witness stand without suffering grievous public harm, at least in the court of public opinion. I doubt whether entrenched views were changed.

Ford was an anvil of obtuseness on the stand, incapable of appreciating what he allegedly did wrong in the conflict of interest case over donations solicited from lobbyists and their clients for his charitable kids football foundation. It is admittedly a pedantic, if not downright frivolous legal matter, though still with the potential to strip Ford of office, depending on how the judge rules and how punitive the possible outcome. Ford was either disingenuous or brilliantly cunning (hard to credit) in his testimony.

The case is not particularly complex. Neither, however, is it significantly compromising as evidence of purported misconduct by a public official. Ford’s defence was basically to plead ignorance of the rules. But if Ford is a lunkhead for failing to grasp the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act he allegedly violated during a February council meeting where he (wrongly) voted on a motion to drop the fine levied against him by the city’s integrity commissioner — also to repay the $3,150 in donations — so too were all the other councillors present that day because not a one objected on procedural grounds. Ditto journalists, who failed to twig. So there’s a lot of stupidity to go around.

I dislike intervention by the courts — impeachment, essentially — over a picayune matter that should be left for voters to judge in the next election.

I dislike that even more than I bemoan a bozo as mayor of Toronto.

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